Multilayer perceptron | EPFL Graph Search

A multilayer perceptron (MLP) is a misnomer for a modern feedforward artificial neural network, consisting of fully connected neurons with a nonlinear kind of activation function, organized in at least three layers, notable for being able to distinguish data that is not linearly separable. It is a misnomer because the original perceptron used a Heaviside step function, instead of a nonlinear kind of activation function (used by modern networks). Modern feedforward networks are trained using the backpropagation method and are colloquially referred to as the "vanilla" neural networks. Timeline

In 1958, a layered network of perceptrons, consisting of an input layer, a hidden layer with randomized weights that did not learn, and an output layer with learning connections, was introduced already by Frank Rosenblatt in his book Perceptron. This extreme learning machine

Adaptive Mitigation: Identification of the Dynamic Drivers of Effective Policy during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Thierry Bossy

Introduction: The unprecedented speed and scale of the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the rapid implementation of untested public health measures to mitigate the consequences of viral spread. In the 8 months that have passed since the first recognized case, an enormous amount of research has been published evaluating the efficacy of the various policies implemented by different countries, however the majority of these studies focus on a specific region or time, over-representing high-income countries during periods of extreme transmission or “peak events”. The aim of this study is to provide a more general analysis that considers a global scope of the pandemic and the dynamic drivers that build effective policies to mitigate human interactions and slow the spread of disease. Methods: We collected a range of information regarding epidemic trends, weather, demographics, government response and mobility reports across the globe. We then built an hybrid Neural Network that combined an LSTM layer with a multilayer perceptron to infer the reproduction number from various non-epidemiological factors. The model was designed to predict the reproduction number (R-value) on 93 countries with available data and compare it to our ground truth estimate obtained from officially reported epidemiological data. Finally, we used an alternative model to assess the impact of public health measures on the epidemic. Findings: From the available features, we obtained the best performances using demographics combined with mobility features. The sanitary indices (beds/thousand, diabetes prevalence, ...) did not help the prediction and, more interestingly, the pressure indicator of historical weather forecast improved the prediction of the reproduction number by about 4.5%. This optimized model predicted the reproduction number with a mean absolute error of 0.254 across the 93 countries over the time of the epidemic. For many countries (Switzerland, United Kingdom, South Africa, ...) this error passed below 0.17. An alternative version of the model allowed us to estimate the impact of policies in terms of average reduction in reproduction number, and more importantly, allowed us to compare these trends between countries. For instance, we observe that the model showed that no policy had a positive impact in India as opposed to Switzerland, where most of them are associated to improved epidemic control. Conclusion: Understanding these complex interactions may allow individuals and policy makers to better adapt mitigation strategies to optimize the efficacy of the implemented policies.

2020

Kernel Density Estimation of Electromyographic Signals and Ensemble Learning for Highly Accurate Classification of a Large Set of Hand/Wrist Motions

Parviz Ghaderi

The performance of myoelectric control highly depends on the features extracted from surface electromyographic (sEMG) signals. We propose three new sEMG features based on the kernel density estimation. The trimmed mean of density (TMD), the entropy of density, and the trimmed mean absolute value of derivative density were computed for each sEMG channel. These features were tested for the classification of single tasks as well as of two tasks concurrently performed. For single tasks, correlation-based feature selection was used, and the features were then classified using linear discriminant analysis (LDA), non-linear support vector machines, and multi-layer perceptron. The eXtreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) classifier was used for the classification of two movements simultaneously performed. The second and third versions of the Ninapro dataset (conventional control) and Ameri's movement dataset (simultaneous control) were used to test the proposed features. For the Ninapro dataset, the overall accuracy of LDA using the TMD feature was 98.99 +/- 1.36% and 92.25 +/- 9.48% for able-bodied and amputee subjects, respectively. Using ensemble learning of the three classifiers, the average macro and micro-F-score, macro recall, and precision on the validation sets were 98.23 +/- 2.02, 98.32 +/- 1.93, 98.32 +/- 1.93, and 98.88 +/- 1.31%, respectively, for the intact subjects. The movement misclassification percentage was 1.75 +/- 1.73 and 3.44 +/- 2.23 for the intact subjects and amputees. The proposed features were significantly correlated with the movement classes [Generalized Linear Model (GLM); P-value < 0.05]. An accurate online implementation of the proposed algorithm was also presented. For the simultaneous control, the overall accuracy was 99.71 +/- 0.08 and 97.85 +/- 0.10 for the XGBoost and LDA classifiers, respectively. The proposed features are thus promising for conventional and simultaneous myoelectric control.

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2022